The Rana Malik Center is a dairy shop in Islamabad’s G-10 sector. The sign over it offers milk, fresh yoghurt, lassi and desi ghee. Rana Muhammad Ijaz has lived with his family in the flat upstairs for more than thirty years. His youngest daughter, Laiba, made him tea every morning and again before bed, he told Abid Hussain of Al Jazeera. “She used to massage my shoulders before I went to bed too,” he said. “Now that she is gone, I miss it all.”

Laiba Ijaz was 24 and had won the gold medal in physics at the International Islamic University Islamabad, a publicly funded institution. She was found dead near her home on October 9. Initial police findings say she likely took her own life after she and her family were cheated out of millions of rupees, tens of thousands of dollars, by a man who had promised her a place at Harvard.

That is what the police file says. The family’s story is longer.

A family that climbed

Ijaz left school after the eighth grade and his wife after the tenth. All four of their daughters went to university. Two studied mathematics. One spent a year in China on a scholarship, learning Mandarin. Laiba also studied on scholarships, and when the medal came, her father said, she danced and jumped in front of her sisters. She taught science at an Islamabad school and gave tuition to children in grades 2 to 6. Her university offered her a scholarship to study in Saudi Arabia. She wanted America instead.

She asked her father to pay. “I did all the work myself, and I teach tuitions too, so can’t you do this for me?” He remembers his answer: “My dear daughter, I will.”

The card looked right

She met Muhammad Noman this year at a call centre in Blue Area, the capital’s business district. She worked late there, mostly among men. Her father disliked the place and she quit. Then Noman started coming to the shop for milk and yoghurt, and asking about Saudi Arabia. “No, we will not go to Saudi Arabia. We will go to America,” Ijaz says he told him.

Noman said he worked at the Supreme Court. He showed a service card and said that as a government employee he needed no licence. “The card looked right to me too. I showed it to the people next to me,” Ijaz said. The family accepted his help. “That was our biggest mistake.”

Looking back, the most convincing document in the whole affair was the first one: a card saying its bearer worked for the state. Everything else rested on it.

The family paid in stages. First came 2.2 million rupees ($7,900) for university fees. Then Noman said Harvard needed proof of 7.2 million rupees ($25,900) in funds, and that the money had to pass through his account to be converted into dollars. “To help my daughter, I sold a plot which I owned. I also sold the [family] jewellery, so I could complete the demanded 7.2 million rupees,” Ijaz said. The Federal Investigation Agency later registered a case against Noman and a woman named Fatima Sarwar, also called Aiza, over Rs9.3 million allegedly taken from the family, Minute Mirror reported.

The family got a file in return, and it was thorough. It held Harvard offer and scholarship letters, a US immigration form with an official-looking stamp, a sponsor’s affidavit from a relative in New York, an embassy record with Laiba’s photograph and a business-class ticket to Boston. The final version, handed over in late September, also included a bank statement in her name and a visa interview date of October 12.

In early October Ijaz rang Noman to help prepare his daughter for the interview. Noman said he was in Quetta and would be back the next day. The family grew suspicious and took the papers to a travel agent, who found the Boston ticket was fake. A neighbour who is a lawyer went through the rest and told them none of it was genuine. Ijaz says they learned the truth around October 6.

“I used to tell her, ‘What had to happen has happened,’” her father said. But Laiba kept hoping, he said, that the US authorities and Harvard might still process a real application for her.

Friday

On October 9, a Friday, Ijaz was getting ready to close the shop for prayers when Laiba told him Noman had messaged her. He would pray at the local mosque, he wrote, and then come to see the family. “Laiba, my dear, he will not come. There is no need to listen to his message,” her father told her. It was one of the last things he said to her. He told her to stay inside and asked his wife to make sure she did. When he came back, his wife told him another message had come from Noman and Laiba had gone out, though her mother tried to stop her.

“Upon hearing this, the ground slipped from under my feet,” Ijaz said. Her brother-in-law, Zaid bin Afzal, and a younger brother went to look for her. One of her sisters used a phone-tracking app to guide them to an area near the house. They found her body at about 3:30pm, less than two hours after she had left. Zaid called the police emergency line, then called Ijaz and told him only that Laiba was “being stubborn and refusing to come home”. Ijaz knew at once that something was wrong.

In custody

Prime Minister Shehbaz Sharif ordered Noman’s arrest the day after Laiba died. Police and the FIA opened separate cases. Noman was arrested two days after her death, and an Islamabad court remanded him to police custody for five days. On October 20, according to police, four men on two motorcycles opened fire while officers were taking him to recover evidence. Police said the men had come to free him and shot him instead. He died while being treated for his wounds. An investigation is under way. No one has been arrested.

Noman was in the state’s hands, and the state did not keep him alive long enough to stand trial.

On October 21, Interior Minister Mohsin Naqvi visited the family and handed over more than 5 million rupees ($18,000) that officials said had been recovered from Noman. The plot and the jewellery are gone, and the money cannot bring back what the family lost. Ijaz does not grieve for the man who deceived them. “In my view, whatever happened was right,” he said of the killing.

An unregulated trade

Laiba was one of a growing number of Pakistanis who want to study in the United States. The Institute of International Education’s Open Doors report counted 13,165 Pakistani students at US institutions in 2024-25, the most Pakistan has ever sent and a 75 percent rise from 2017-18. The US International Trade Administration says that made Pakistan the 13th-largest source of foreign students in the US.

The FIA said Noman was not a registered visa agent. Even a registered one would have answered to no regulator, because the government does not oversee education consultancies at all, according to the All Pakistan Association of Foreign Education and Immigration Consultants. “I do not know of a regulatory body that checks or registers education consultants,” said Nushmiya Sukhera, cofounder of CollegeWorks, a consultancy in Lahore. “No education consultancy can guarantee admission.”

What the father believes

A senior police official, speaking anonymously, said the investigation into Laiba’s death is continuing. Initial postmortem findings point to suicide, the official said, and footage shows her leaving home alone with a phone in her hand. The rest of the forensic report usually takes 15 to 20 days.

The family does not accept the finding. Zaid said that after he found her, he was sure “she could not have done this herself”.

Her father put it more bluntly. “She did not die herself,” he said. “He [Noman] killed her.”